Architecture does really exist, like Coca-Cola: though coated with ideology, it is a real production, falsely satisfying falsified need. Cities become the spectacle of our own alienation.from Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the City
We tend to see the architecture first when we look at a city. It is, after all, the biggest thing. It photographs well, you can experience it from a safe distance, and above all it is easy to understand passively, with the eye. Many people stop there. They believe that cities are made of architecture and humans just incidentally live within it. Which in turn creates a collective sense that cities are made, not just OF buildings, but FOR buildings. Not for people. The way architects use the abstracted and passive human figure in their renderings (and the exclusion of people from architectural photographs) says as much. Postmodern architecture and urban planning makes many claims to follow New Urbanist principlesideas first proposed by Jane Jacobs in the 1960s. Jacobs argues for putting people first through studying the way they actually interact in cities (rather than how we think they should interact). Jacobs breakthrough work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was a call to arms for all city-dwellers. She demanded that planners focus on building healthy communities rather than monuments. And she laid out very clear guidelines as to how this can be accomplished. The book is extremely passionate and well researched (both historically and on the street), and is the principle text of the New Urbanism movement.
It was observed in the 1960s that to an architect, benches are "artifacts the purpose of which is to punctuate architectural photographs" (Whyte). Despite the prominence of Jacobs' work in contemporary urbanism theory, on the street not much has changed. Planning boards have dutifully shortened blocks, upped density for residential zoning, added mixed-use areas and done away with enclosed parks. Sam Sullivan, the current mayor of Vancouver, is a New Urbanist believer. He often drops words like "density" and "mixed-use" into his pronouncements on Vancouver's future. Many of Vancouver's newest downtown areas show the clear influence of Jacobs thought. But those in charge of city space have continually ignored her central argument: people and communities first. So these New Urbanist enclaves are the very areas which are the most desolate and boring. But they still photograph nicely.
Recently built architecture in Vancouver is a visual experience mostly about order and cleanliness. Its pristine condition must be maintained at all costs. Hence the security guards to remove unaesthetic human figures, the prevention and removal of graffiti, and restrictions on the use of space (no food carts or street performers, loud parties or congregating in numbers). As in most cities, buildings are simply torn down once their pristine condition cannot be easily maintained. This is all in service of what the Situationists called the "urban spectacle." And it is by no means a natural consequence of urban space. As Jacobs said, "Extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and vulgarity" (7).
The Situationist International movement stated we must not "work to prolong the mechanical civilizations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure. We propose to invent new, changeable decors" (Theory 15). But can one simple human do anything in the face of these heroic objects, buildings? Jacobs observed that the human tendency to seek and build community will naturally create enjoyable and rewarding urban spaces, as long as this is not actively prevented through extraordinary incentives. Through many years of careful watching, she witnessed that a neighborhood is a problem of organized complexity--like an ecosystem or an animal. There are built-in mechanisms by which it heals itself. It can adapt to changing circumstances. But a neighborhood can be pushed beyond a certain point, and it will die. And our simplistic ways of dealing with problems in both ecosystems and neighborhoods usually cause more harm than good.
There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness and disorder, and that quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and be served.There are several ideologies which support this meddling. One of the most pernicious is the belief that cities are, by their very nature, bad for people. This is not in any way a recent argument or particularly relevant to our time. It can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, if not earlier (Jacobs 15). And this very belief is often the agent of destruction which wreaks havoc on urban communities. Underlying it is a very basic modern neurosis: fear of contamination through proximity. We fear touching other people because of their potential dirtiness, and even verbally interacting with them for fear of their moral uncleanliness. Richard Sennett, in his book Flesh and Stone: The Body and The City in Western Civilization, argues this, and concludes that in the new geography "the body moves passively, desensitized in space" (18). We have become encased in a solitary silence and protected from obstacles to movement. And these characteristics of movement (along with their accoutrements, modernist block apartments) can now be seen in cities all over the world.
(Jacobs 15)
The tropes of "wasted urban space" or "dirty neighborhoods" have condemned to the bulldozer many otherwise-fixable (or, in fact, still very vibrant) areas. These ideologies enable the needs of buildings (and their builders) to trump the needs of communities, over and over again. But there is hope: by its very nature, "the city brings together people who are different, it intensifies the complexity of social life, it presents people to each other as strangers. All these aspects of experience--difference, complexity, strangeness--afford resistance to domination" (Sennet 26). The Situationists comment a great deal on the alienating character of contemporary cities, but where the modernist architects proposed pristine redevelopment, they proposed play and spontaneity. They demanded that architecture be "a means of knowledge and a means of action," that it be modifiable through the will of its inhabitants (Theory 15).
The privileging of the passive visual experience over the active tactile experience is a fundamentally anti-urban attitude. Cities are not, despite the intentions of architects, sculpture gardens. A city is an interaction, the sum of its residents, a conglomeration of communities and a historical palimpsest. We are all implicated in the art of creating a city. The architecture should function as a frame for what we create. Or perhaps a gallery space: the time has ended for art which sits passively within the walls of a white cube. So should the era of maintaining a passive attitude towards architecture. The development of the art of graffiti hints at a potential, but many other avenues remain to be explored. Rather than isolated bodies placed at the mercy of heroic, monumental stone objects, we have the ability (and the civic duty) to inhabit the city actively--to defy architecture. We must modify it by our will, lest it continue to modify us.
There are other tools we can use towards this end. Sennet proposes the idea that "...the individual body can come back to sensate life by experiencing displacement and difficulty" (324). We can reawaken the urban body by cultivating areas which are challenging to navigate, performing and interacting with strangers, through simply bumping into people and causing a momentary physical connection. In addition to taking an active role in architecture, we can take an active role in urban experience. Most of all, places where much interaction exists must be protected from redevelopment; we must look more carefully at our desires to bulldoze and slum-clear lest we destroy the only area in the city which offers physical sensation or a potential for interpersonal connection. The fear of dirt and physical closeness is a powerful one, as is our belief in the alienating nature of cities. But a fear can be overcome. There is a real danger which this fear poses: the danger that we will pacify ourselves entirely, and become nothing more than human silhouettes in an architectural rendering.
Marcel Duchamp once hired a group of children who were playing on the street to come into the gallery and run around during an exhibition. There are dozens of other examples of artists defying the hushed and controlled gallery space; through cutting into it, repurposing it, defying the social conventions implicit in it. And there are many examples of city-dwellers defying architecture and the urban spectacle. When children play on city streets, though, we berate them (or their parents) for being dirty, dangerous, for interrupting our silent reverie. We should be applauding them for their creative response to space.
The gist of this article was first published in Woo Magazine, Issue 2 (Neighbors), March 2008